On another occasion, when criticising minutely Legh’s reports of the Papist houses, the same scholar says:-- “This loathsome return bears the stamp of malignant falsehood upon every line, and it could only have been penned by a man of blasted character and of so filthy an imagination that no judge or jury would have believed him on his oath.” Such testimony is all the more remarkable, for Dr. Jessopp tells us that few men in their early days had the current views against the monks more firmly fixed in their minds, and few had more difficulty in surrendering them under the stern pressure of historic facts. The _Comperta_, or abstracts of minutes drawn up by the visitors, are almost entirely concerned with questions of morality; lists of offenders were compiled, with the charge against the name. The charges are absolutely unsupported, as a rule, by a shadow of evidence, save that the odious sins are said, absurdly enough, to have been voluntarily confessed by the culprits. What was the character of the chief visitors, on whose word the average uneducated Protestant is still inclined to believe in all that is odious against both monks and nuns? Cromwell himself was steeped in peculation and in the giving and taking of bribes. All England knew that he had his price for everything, great or small; his own papers reek with it; and when he fell so suddenly, and earned a well-merited scaffold death, his selling offices and grants “for manyfold sums of money” was one of the chief charges against him. As with the master, so with the men. Visitors Legh and Layton, and, in a smaller degree, those less busy visitors London and Ap Rice, were only too ready to extort money from the houses on which they reported, and to appropriate all they could or dared of the confiscated spoils. The evidence of this is overwhelming. Dr. Gairdner, writing some years ago in his preface to the tenth volume of the Calendar of Letters and Papers, expressed the guarded opinion that “we have no reason, indeed, to think highly of the character of Cromwell’s visitors;” and since then very much more evidence has come to light. Layton--a man from the ranks, and entirely dependent on Cromwell’s favour and support, to whom he showed a blasphemously expressed servility--lost no opportunity of obtaining and extorting bribes. Moreover, he was ever ready to sacrifice truth to please his masters; and wrote filthy suggestions and coarse jests with obvious relish. Cromwell rewarded him with much ecclesiastical preferment, which included the deanery of York. He utilised his position by pawning the cathedral plate, which the Chapter had to redeem after his death. He died at Brussels in 1545; England became apparently too warm a place for him, for he pestered Cromwell to get him “placed beyond the seas.”